I took another business trip to the farthest regions of northern Wisconsin this week. This time I ended up staying overnight in a hotel in Hudson, which is all the way to Eau Claire and then some.
Hudson has a prettified downtown area where they kept most of the old buildings and rehabbed them for modern business, and to their credit it worked pretty well. The hotel we stayed in was not in the downtown area, though, and it was not in an old building, or it was, but not in the sense that I was using when I mentioned the downtown area. The building was definitely old; it looked like it went up sometime in the 70s. And they’d made some attempts to prettify it over the years, but it looked like a 70s building with new wallpaper and generous placing of crown molding and gingerbread geegaws. The overall effect was of a hotel that was meant to look grand but ended up looking rather sad and kind of lonely next to the eight lanes of traffic tearing past just outside the front door.
The room I checked into was decorated in shades of harvest gold, a color scheme that went out of style just after I graduated from college. They’d made some updates: the door opened with a card, not a key, and the television set was a flat screen, although reception was fuzzy unless the refrigerator was running. The TV, the fridge and all the lamps on that side of the room were plugged into the same power strip, so I jiggled the plug and reception cleared up for a while. Had to get up to re-jiggle it when the reception dropped out periodically, though.
If there was one thing above all others that bothered me about the hotel, though, it was the towels. Every hotel I’ve stayed at this summer, no matter how good or bad, old or new, cheap & run-down or well-maintained, they all had big, fluffy towels in the bathroom. Lots and lots of them. Like, usually four. I don’t know how many other people need, but I typically use just one. Maybe I should use all four, just to see what that’s like. Anyway, the hotel in Hudson had the cheapest, un-fluffiest towels of any hotel I’ve stayed in, just limp, rough towels, and they weren’t as big as the bath towels I’m used to, whether at home or away. I don’t think I ask for too much, but I do expect to get fluffy towels in the bath.
On the up side, it served a great complimentary breakfast, probably the best I’ve had at any of the hotels I’ve stayed in during this round of business trips. It’s usually some watery eggs and greasy sausage, or a bagel that’s hard as shoe leather, but this hotel served a breakfast cooked to order from a menu in a cozy sit-down restaurant, with all the coffee you could drink. A table in the back was surrounded with regulars stopping in for their morning coffee and plate of eggs & bacon. It was a real pleasure.
This Is Drivel 